Sustained connectivity between nodes of a wireless network is an important feature of the network because it assures quality and reliability of the service that the network is providing to its users. Currently existing wireless networks depend on two types of technology to establish links between nodes; radio frequency (RF) and optical. Nodes are constructed with components identified as routers that perform the actual passing of information in to and out of the node. The routers are either one type of technology or the other or, more likely, one of each type in order to take advantage of each technology's strong points. For example, RF performs adequately in most conditions except for rain while optical technology performs adequately except for fog. Additionally, RF technology typically has a lower bandwidth than optical (11 Mbps vs. 155 Mbps), but RF does not suffer from the same limited line-of-site characteristics as optical technology.
Regardless of the technology used, bearer traffic (the actual messages moving through the network as information packets) needs to be forwarded from one node to another in an efficient manner. Both RF and optically-based systems use various modulation and coding techniques to transmit the bearer traffic from one node to another. However, at each node, the specific type of link (either RF or optical) is terminated, Internet Protocol (IP) control and signaling messages attached to the messages must be extracted therefrom, repackaged into formats that can be transported to the next node and finally retransmitted. This process traverses multiple protocol layers as each message is essentially “torn down” and rebuilt at each intermediate node resulting in processing delays and increased delivery time of the message. As such, there is a need in the art for improving the reliability of node performance while reducing the necessary amount of processing steps at the intermediate nodes to complete message delivery.